Searching

Both Quick Search and Advanced Search are available. For most of your search queries Quick Search is the tool of your choice.
Advanced Search can be used if a term or a property must be searched precisely in a specific field.

Quick Search

Quick Search uses a probabilistic search engine that applies word stemming and stop word filtering and that ranks found documents
according to occurrence and frequency of the matched terms. It searches in the PDF full text, in the bibliography
(authors/editors, year, title, journal/series title), in the abstract and in other fields.

Search Operators

Quick Search provides the following search operators:

Operator

Description

Examples

AND

prion AND bovine

OR

prion OR bovine

NOT

prion NOT bovine

XOR

finds documents that contain either one or the other term, but not both together. A bit exotic.

Aguzzi XOR Glatzel

NEAR

matches documents containing both terms within 10 words of each other. Order of matching terms is irrelevant. With NEAR/n (n = number) the threshold distance can be set.

arab NEAR gender

ADJ

matches documents containing both terms within 10 words of each other. Like NEAR, but the terms must appear in the same order as in the query. With ADJ/n (n = number) the threshold distance can be set.

arab ADJ genderemerging ADJ/1 market

+

includes documents which contain the so marked term or phrase. The terms marked with + do not contribute towards the document ranking.

synthesis +drug

-

excludes documents which contain the so marked term or phrase (works like NOT).

synthesis -drug

All operators must be written with uppercase letters. The precedence of operators can be controlled using brackets ().

Phrase Searches

Terms within double quotes are matched exactly as written (and as written in the given order).

Example: "neurodegenerative diseases"

Wildcards

The only allowed wildcard is *, which matches 0 or more characters. As a trailing wildcard it can be used only at the end of a term.

Example: chlamy*

Fields

To find a term or phrase in a specific field, the field name can be added in front of it using a colon as separator. Terms can be grouped within brackets.

Field name

Description

Example

title

Title of the publication

title:philosophytitle:(mice "men")The double quotes cause that men is not filtered as stop word.

creators_name

Creators

creators_name:(haas, henriette)

editors_name

Editors

editors_name:haas

book_title

Title of a book

book_title:(medical imaging)

date

Year of publication

date:2014

publication

Title of series/journal

publication:(Virology Journal) publication:"Virology Journal"

keywords

Uncontrolled keywords

keywords:drug

doi

DOI

doi:10.1002/hlca.19970800125

isbn

ISBN

isbn:978-3-658-03304-0

pubmedid

PubMed ID

pubmedid:23770569

Tips and Tricks

Also subjects and institutes can be searched. For this, the Dewey Decimal Classification code or the numbers of the institutes must be used.
This information can be obtained by clicking a subject in the Dewey Decimal Classification or an institute in Communities & Collections and by extracting the relevant ddc notation or number from the URL.

Examples: ontologies ddc000 finds publications on ontologies in computer science (Dewey Decimal Classification 000).testament 10236 date:2013 finds publications of the
Institute of Theology that contain the term "testament" and were published in 2013.

Mathematical equations can be searched using LaTeX notation. Example: $\sin^2 \theta_W$ can be searched using the notation \sin^2 \theta_W.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search provides several fields from ZORA. By clicking the "?" button at the respective field, a short explanation about the field and its allowed contents can be displayed.
In Advanced Search, the previous operators and rules of Quick Search do not apply. Terms are always matched exactly, except if wildcards are used.

Wildcards

Allowed wildcards are % (matching exactly 1 character) or * (matching 0 or any number of characters).

Matching Terms within a Field

A drop down menu in front of a field allows to choose between "all of" (all terms must match, Boolean AND) or "any of" (any of the terms can match, Boolean OR). Default is "all of".

Match Conditions for Fields

At the bottom of the form, at "Retrieved records must fulfill", a drop down menu allows to choose between "all of these conditions" (Boolean AND search) and "any of these conditions" (Boolean OR search). Default is "all of these conditions".

Browsing

The box "Browse by" allows to browse publications by four different categories: Communities & Collections (faculties, institutes, selected journals and special collections), general subjects of the Dewey Decimal Classification, author/editor names or publication year.

Display of Results

After searching using Quick Search, results are initially ordered by relevance (occurence, weight, frequency and position of matching query terms). In Advanced Search, results are initially sorted in reverse chronological order (newest documents first).
In Advanced Search, order by relevance is not available. The hits can be reorderd choosing sort options from a drop down menu.